Archive for October, 2010

For the last month, I have pretty much stayed away from MMA. With the exception of the KJ Noons/Nick Diaz fight on Showtime, which I already have and didn’t need to shell out 54 bucks on a PPV for, I haven’t seen a single MMA fight.

With today’s news that the UFC and WEC are (FINALLY) merging together and an 8-week period about to begin featuring many big-time fights for local guys, I figured it’d be a good time to give the sport a second chance.

I don’t know exactly where it went so bad, but I do know that at some point over the last three months, my enjoyment watching mixed martial arts fights disappeared. Maybe it was the disaster of UFC 118 in Boston, when not only did B.J. Penn look like he wanted no part of competing inside the Octagon, but the co-main event piting Randy Couture vs. James Toney was the single worst fight of that magnitude I’ve ever seen. Maybe it was the StrikeForce debacle on CBS, when Dan Henderson didn’t bother getting in shape for a main event on network television against Jake Shields, followed by an ugly post-fight brawl triggered by Jason “Mayhem” Miller that did the sport of MMA absolutely no good.

Am I the only one feeling like there’s just something missing nowadays? For close to 20 minutes, Niko Vitale and Kala Kolohe Hose put on a show at the Blaisdell recently that made me realize MMA can still be one of the most popular sports in the world. But outside of that, I have left nearly every other MMA show, whether watching live or on TV, feeling like I just wasted my time.

X-1 has a card coming up a week from Saturday. Penn steps back in the ring against Matt Hughes later in November. Kendall Grove is fighting Demian Maia later in December. StrtikeForce has a very good card scheduled for early December.

The next two months are going to go a long way in me deciding whether MMA has reached it’s peak, or if it’ll continue to grow and expand in popularity.